“They certainly do not think so.” Her smile was crooked. “It is something that can be done. With the right preparation and the right powers.”
“Small wonder the Lily Goddess fears,” I said. “If even that idea crosses the Storm Sea, She is at risk. Let alone someone with the sort of weapon that can do the job.”
“Oh, it is far more complex than possessing a mere weapon.” The Dancing Mistress frowned. “I do not have the secret of it myself, and wish nothing to do with such knowledge, but the Interim Council had discussed it more than once.”
“Interim Council?” The sound of that title bothered me. I had read enough history to know better.
“When the Duke fell,” she said heavily, “Federo stood forward, with a few of the great trading factors. Our little plan was secret enough, but general discontent was a club sport in Copper Downs under the Duke. It was not hard to find people who thought they knew better.”
“I suppose after four hundred years, there was no heir to come forward.”
“No. Not a trace of the old ruling house. The Duke had been a collateral cousin, but he’d killed them all long before they could die of old age. To keep there from being a claim. That was part of his own grip on power.”
“Your council rules the city now?” I was fascinated at the idea of the Dancing Mistress-a quiet woman who walked in shadow-sitting at the table of government.
“To some degree. The gods have bestirred themselves after long silence, the priests bicker, and our sister states along the Stone Coast have asserted all manner of baroque rights and interests.”
“Were you sent on this errand to get you out of the city?” I asked her gently.
“I claimed this mission for my own.” She smiled again, this time with genuine affection. “The council would have sent an embassy with edicts to claim you, if you yet lived. We had learned from the captain of Southern Escape where you went, and were set to petition the Prince of the City to proclaim you free and seek you out.”
That made me laugh. “The Prince of the City? He is a fop with less power than a decently successful chandler. He sits on a throne of lapis and silver to impress foreigners, and spends his time seducing their wives.”
“This is not so clear from Copper Downs,” she said with asperity.
“No. Petraeans see a title and think it makes the man.”
She returned my laugh. “You have become one of your country.”
“No more than you are.”
“No, I suppose not.” With a gathering of breath, the Dancing Mistress resumed her tale. “A claim has been made upon the Ducal throne. A threat, really. A bandit chieftain in the Blue Mountains campaigns ever closer to the city. His name is Choybalsan. He has taken up some of this old magic of my people, and wiped out half a dozen prides of us when we tried to fight him.”
“Oh…” I stepped around the fire and reached for her hand. “I am very sorry. So many soulpaths clipped to nothing.”
“To be sure.” She pulled away from me to stir the pot awhile. Then: “We are not numerous now. We never were, in truth. It would not take much more to drive my people from the world as anything but a memory.”
I sat with her in silence, until the Dancing Mistress was ready to resume the tale. Finally, she was. “Choybalsan is as deadly to my race as a fire to a forest. He has upset the gods as well. He seems likely to rise on the back of this freed magic to oppose them.”
“Did he kill the god who was slain?”
“Goddess. Marya, who watched over women’s desires. No, not him. We are not sure who did the deed-agents of the Saffron Tower acting in secret, or some darker force. That is what most disturbs the priests of Copper Downs.”
I could imagine.
“So,” she went on, “we come to you. The only person alive besides Choybalsan who has controlled that magic he now rides.”
Recoiling with horror, I nearly shouted, “I did not control it!” The tillerman Chowdry looked up to see what we were about with our arguing.
The Dancing Mistress shook her head. “Oh, surely you did, when you unbound the spells from the Duke.”
This so distressed me that I went and exercised myself with a boat hook for a very long time, until the captain came to beg me to stop destroying the rail.
We avoided each other most of that day, but the sense of the Dancing Mistress’ story was clear enough. I had touched it last before this Choybalsan. If anyone could turn him, it might be me.
Such reasoning smacked of idiotic desperation. The Duke had spent four centuries suppressing all other powers in his demesne. He’d even cowed the gods to silence. Who else could rise up now to defend Copper Downs?
Not me. Toppling one magic-ridden despot was more than enough to last me this lifetime and my next several turns on the Wheel besides.
In time we reached the shipping lanes. I’d grown accustomed to Utavi and his sailors-the nervously smiling Chowdry, Utavi’s giant catamite Tullah, the rest of the sullen crew, but I was eager to be on to the Stone Coast. Loitering in the shallows along Bhopura gained us nothing. Along the way, our hosts had argued several times late into the night, making me nervous, but always they hid their words from us.
The captain did not hide so much. He grumbled time and again. I think Utavi would have sold us out even then if he could have found a buyer, though our swaggering ways and his fear of Mother Vajpai should have discouraged him from that plan.
In any case, he took us out into the deeper water, away from Chittachai ’s natural habitat, where we could find the big oceangoing traffic. The men grew nervous in the open sea, but money was money, and they were making well more than a year’s wages with the work of little more than a week. We hailed two ships before we found a third who would both answer and admit to being bound for the Stone Coast. Lucidinous was a high-sided iron-hulled vessel flying a flag from Dun Cranmoor.
When we’d finally talked ourselves aboard, Chowdry scrambled after me up the ladder.
“Where are you going?” I asked him roughly in Seliu.
“Utavi has threatened my life,” he replied with a quaver in his voice. “I would not agree to bind you over for sale back in Kalimpura.”
Bastards, I thought. It had been Chowdry who seemed at the disdvantage in their whispered disputes.
“You have no place where I am going,” I hissed, but already Utavi was cursing loudly from below, and pale-skinned sailors were tugging me over the rail. They glared down at Chowdry, then heaved him aboard as well when Utavi showed them a long curved blade.
The decision was out of our hands.
Chowdry stood at the rail and cursed in some dialect of Seliu that I could barely follow, until a pair of bulky men took us all to see a ship’s mate.
He was as pale as the rest of them, which was to say in these latitudes red as an apple above his sweat-stained whites. “You ain’t armed, I trust.”
I was mortified at how pleasing I found a Petraean voice. “Only a work knife, sir,” I said.
The Dancing Mistress bowed and flexed her claws.
“You don’t worry me, ma’am,” he told her with a tight smile. “Come on, then.” The mate waved us out.
We followed, Chowdry reluctant in the face of new authority. We were swiftly brought to a small mess. Looking at the four men waiting behind the table, I realized this was a hearing.
Then I saw that one of them was Srini, the purser from Southern Escape.
His astonishment was even greater than my own. “Green,” he said in Seliu, half-rising from his seat. He took it again in some embarrassment as the fat man at the end of the table glared him down.
“Srini,” I said in Petraean. “It is good to see you again.”
“These people are known to you?” the captain asked Srini.
“Only the gi-” He took in my cropped hair and sailor’s clothes, then corrected himself. “Only Green.”
The purser’s slip might as well have been a thunderclap, but no one else seemed to notice.